Tuxboot, Clonezilla USB simply not booting

I needed to do a bare-metal backup of my server, and thought I'd use Clonezilla, a live Linux distro that walks you through taking a disk or partition image and saving it to a file. It doesn't seem to allow writing to the local file system (as I guess it was designed for CD-ROM), so two USB sticks are required.

That is, if you get over the first hurdle. The instructions for creating a USB bootable version of Clonezilla are very straight forwards. You download Tuxboot, and simply select the USB drive to extract Clonezilla to. Just that, it never worked for me.

After some fiddling with BIOS' and trying different computers, I came to the conclusion that it just doesn't work. Then a niggling thought cropped up. GPT. Modern disks use GUID Partition tables, which are very different from the Master Boot Record partitions from days of old. My USB stick was indeed setup as a GPT disk.

I used Windows "diskpart" to resolve the issue.

fdisk
list disk
select disk X
clean
convert mbr
quit

Making sure you select the correct disk number when doing the select disk command - otherwise you might wipe out something important! This command completely wipes the partition tables from the disk and converts it to a MBR style disk. You can then just use the normal Windows Disk Management tool to create a partition and format it.

Run Tuxboot again and you'll suddenly have a bootable USB stick.